This feels like a jarring transition to me, but the alternative was to stick with Maxima as she does a ton of paperwork , hands out tickets (or whatever the procedure is for arresting space mercenaries) and debriefs the team up in NYC. That was definitely the only other option.

The answer to the question, “Why didn’t the orbs give Sydney her level up sooner?” is because it amused me more to do it this way. Besides, now that Sydney seems to know how to pull up the skill web, maybe the orbs are content to wait to be prompted now.

I wanted Frost to call the guy a psychopath or even a sociopath, (instead of a “person with an extreme personality disorder”) but apparently those aren’t terms psychologists use a lot? “Antisocial Personality Disorder” utterly lacks the gravitas that “Psychopath” carries, so it’s no wonder popular media sticks with the latter. I have to imagine when psychologists are off the clock if they let fly with more colorful descriptions to describe people, like a pressure valve.

Sydney does have mandated time with Frost, but this visit was by request, not her normally scheduled session, which is why she can pimpwalk out early.


Holy crap. I definitely should have changed the “Gender” select on the prior page to “Sex” select. Although then, I don’t know what I would do about the symbols. Like, are the male and female symbols for sex or gender? I think when they were codified, the words sex and gender didn’t have separate definitions. (I’m talking about like, ancient Greece, although I myself wasn’t aware of the need to differentiate the terms prior to about ten years ago. I’d say my awareness of a thing is a pretty low bar, but I suspect I’ve also just described at least half of all Americans as well in this case.) Which leads me to my conundrum. If sex and gender don’t mean the same thing, shouldn’t we have different symbols for male sex and male gender? Really, the solution would have been to design about 30 different totally alien symbols, but since I was translating the text on the screens, it made sense to translate the gender icons. Also since I was running a little behind on the vote incentive, I had trouble justifying spending like two hours designing alien sex icons, which, now that I think about it would have probably been a lot of fun.


The new vote incentive is up! I tried something different this month – instead of doing one well painted picture with a bunch of dress variants, I wanted to tell a bit of a story. Hopefully it makes sense without any dialog or sound effects. So, instead of one picture, you guys are getting nine. I was going to do a tenth one, but I kind of ran out of time. Patreon has the whole series of pics, naturally. I might add it if I find the time, or I could work on the next Tamer: Enhancer book. Time management is not my strongest skill, so we’ll see.

 


Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!